Cait's comments
(member since Apr 16, 2008)
Cait's comments from the Goodreads Feedback group.
(showing 1-20 of 743)
One way to get some ideas for a genre name might be looking at the shelves for the authors' books -- a lot of people use shelf names as genres, so that could give a good wrap-up that would make a useful addition to the author genre drop-down.
A book you shelve must be on exactly one exclusive shelf. You can make Kids Books an exclusive shelf by going into your books, clicking on edit bookshelves in the first column on the left, and clicking "make exclusive" for that shelf. (That will mean that any books you put on your Kids Books shelf can't be marked as To Read, Current Reading, or Read, though. Just checking that that's what you want!) If you make other non-exclusive shelves, you can put your books on as many or as few of those as you like once they're on an exclusive shelf.
Hey, I really like the new "so you're combining lots of editions: are you really sure?" page! Mostly because it's very pretty, but it's also a good reminder. :)
BunWat wrote: "The difficulty is that if you just pass over a corner of the add on your way to scroll down the rest of the page, out it jumps. Its like that really annoying guy in the elevator that you just keep thinking to yourself "don't make eye contact, don't make eye contact!" "Hah! Yes, that is exactly what it's like, isn't it?
I'd rather leave it as it is, with the last comment date being the only one available. That strikes me as a much better indicator of participation.
You know what would be awesome? Some "secondary authors" input-only field that would take a comma-separated list of secondary authors for a book and parse it into the correct secondary author links. (Especially if you could add one role which would be applied to all of those authors!) It would be a huge bonus to those situations where you find a short story anthology, you find the list of twenty-five contributing authors, and you sit there in front of the edit page going "oh, this is a lot of cut-and-pasting in my immediate future".
Kernos wrote: "I think GR author pages could be improved. The books are ordered by number of ratings. I wish I had a choice about how they are ordered, eg, by 1st publication data, series, format, title etc."You can apply these orders to the author's list of book by clicking on "more books" or "N distinct works" to open the list page. That will also let you see all of the author's books, not just the top 10.
(If you want to suggest changing the default order for the profile pages, you should probably start a new comment thread for it -- it'll probably get lost in this discussion about the Amazon integration.)
Kernos wrote: "Also, if you have a category "Women's Fiction", I think you are compelled to have a category "Men's Fiction"!"
No.
It's been mentioned a few times before, and the response was that it was a deliberate decision, I think to cut down on the vote-for-my-friends-automatically concept which bothers some people. I like to friend people because they write great reviews, though, so I'd really like this feature too! Hopefully if enough of us ask for it it'll be reconsidered.
I make a status update on the day I finish a book; I suppose if you wanted reading time you could make one on the day you start and another on the day you finish. (If you use "page 1" and "page {whatever the last page of your edition is}", it will even fill in "{name} has started {book}" and "{name} is finished {book}" all nice and pretty!) I like it because I can see when I re-read a book in the list of status updates, like so.
The "list" view of your shelves has the publication year; you can sort by that. Or, in any view, the sort combo box at the bottom has an option for "year pub".
It would also matter for things like "best translation" or "best narrator" -- editions aren't always interchangeable!
I use the status updates myself to track the exact day I finish (if I remember to update!) -- that's useful to me because I can track each re-read instead of overwriting it.
Huzzah!
rivka wrote: "Very Apple-y. Also very non-standard-English-y. ;)"Well, if we're going to have standards and all, shouldn't it be Ebook to match the capitalization? Or E-book, on the grounds that Ebook looks thoroughly wrong. :)
Arch, when you look at the top of the list of ratings and reviews, there's an option called "filters: all | text-only". If you click on text-only, you'll only see the reviews which have text (a minimum of three words, if I'm recalling correctly).
Otis wrote: "But if you go into swap then click on books i own you can add books that you haven't read to your owned books."Interesting! It's not at all clear from the interface that the "Quick Add" will add any book. (Also, given that a title search will almost never pull up the exact book in the #1 slot, it would be a lot more useful to have a pop-up or a page with search results -- but that's a different issue, I suppose.)
Is there any way on that page to see a list of the books owned but unshelved?
Me too! Let us all join together. :)
It looks like it would be useful to have "Illustrations" become "Illustrator" and "Reader" and "Read by" both become "Narrator".I'm not sure about the non-English roles, since I don't think we have a consensus on translating the roles. I am inclined to leave them in the language given if it seems to match the language of the edition, on the theory that that will be most useful for the readers of that edition. However, I'm not sure that it's always a match, especially on books imported from the various Amazons which tend to have the roles in the language of the bookseller, not of the book.
It looks like the edition information isn't showing on the book details page for books with no format given.
For example, for this book there was no "details:" line visible in the book information until I filled in the format field; once I entered a format, the format and the edition information appeared.
